VA Linux Systems began shipping Tuesday its latest network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, aimed at customers bogged down by increasingly large amounts of data such as digital media companies and storage service providers.

The 9450 NAS, a low-cost storage unit that can facilitate filing sharing between Linux, Unix, Microsoft Corp. Windows and Macintosh operating systems, is the second in a series of such products to come from VA Linux. The latest offering stores up to 6.6 TB of data, the company said.

Starting at less than US$30,000, the device is being marketed as a cost-effective appliance for storing large amounts of data. The 9450 NAS already supports a range of protocols, from Appletalk to HTTP, so customers don't have to pay additional license fees to accommodate those protocols. The machine also comes with free software upgrades and customer support, VA Linux said.

The company also announced Tuesday that it has brought on two leading open source developers to the VA Linux NAS development team. Andrew Tridgell, the original author of Samba, a Windows-compatible file and print server for Unix, and Samba team member Jeremy Allison, will join the newly expanded development group as the company expands that division, VA Linux said.